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Prime these days is more about all the extra shit that's not free shipping. It's basically a "Subscribe to Amazon" product now, which changes its value to something beyond just free 2-day for a lot of people.

I hate to sound like I'm shilling for Amazon here, but have you looked at all the extra shit you get? The video and music streaming services alone, in my book, make up an awesome value for my use case.

There's also a lot of fringe shit that you have to actually look for -- here's the link from their stupid help section that took too long to find.

Agreed. I have the same 12 movies recommended to me in just about every category and then then quality drops off a fucking cliff, taking only a short stop at Walmart-bargain-DVD-bin level before diving into self-produced yoga conspiracy workout documentaries.

I don't listen to music. All the good videos require paying them even more money. Same with the books. Don't like cloud storage and can't use it anyway (no broadband). Don't live in a city so Prime Now and Fresh and all the other local stuff is out. Pantry is more expensive than just buying from local stores (as long as you're willing to buy generic).

Yeah check it out. I've gotten about 10+ free games from twitch prime including the new Devil May Cry remaster and they also give out in game loot for games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Warframe, Overwatch, etc

I dunno, a couple years ago Newegg refunded me the purchase of a raid array that was defective, but to a bank account that no longer existed. After jumping through hoops, they eventually told me to get bent. That was like $120

I did, and they said "we've received nothing." Newegg told me to talk to the bank, the bank told me to talk to Newegg. Newegg gave me some screenshot (with misspellings) that said "the money was sent."

The bank manager even called Newegg while I was there. Basically told me to get fucked. It wasn't a small bank either - Citizens bank

Different strokes for different folks, I order more than just electronics online and prime has a much larger selection. I'm in a small market as well so it really helps when something I'm looker for can't be found locally.

Does Newegg have a higher tier of support for "premier"? I ordered a monitor that ended up sucking (laggy screen, as if you were using a virtualized desktop on a server located several stages away), and they hit me with restocking and return shipping fees. I argued it was defective and they said "ok well waive the restocking fee I guess. Prime would have just taken it back at no cost to me

Opposite experience here. When I received a damaged product from Amazon Warehouse they offered a deep discount or refund without an issue. When I've received damaged products from Newegg they refused to do an exchange and tried to make me to pay return shipping.

It isn’t free like the military, but if you still have access to your old university email account (some give access for perpetuity), then you can pretty much eternally get Premier at $29.99 per year since all they require is verifying your email, which requires access to it.

Initially, the state gave companies that didn’t charge a sales tax, two options: start collecting taxes from here on out, or turn over customer spending records and expose buyers to several years’ worth of taxes on items they bought.

“That’s where I think they’re playing a game. That allows some of them to basically advertise, ‘if you purchase through us, it’s tax-free.’ It’s not tax free.

Newegg refused, gave up spending records, and now their customers have bills.

TL;DR - Instead of Newegg giving up their "customers will buy here because there's no tax" advantage, they sold out their customers and subjected them to back taxes on YEARS worth of purchases.

Newegg sales can occasionally be noticeably better than Amazon prices but it is certainly a matter of watching sales and doing price comparisons is a must. If your buying something that is not on sale then Amazon is generally a safe bet.

Luckily i only owed about $200. But in the past 4 years ive built a ton of computers for people (i dont take money, i do it as a hobby), but i paid for everything and bought everything thru newegg (they paid me back). Point is ive spent $16k on newegg in the past 4 years. But luckily most of the components i bought when i still lived in NY. If i had gotten them in Connecticut i would have owed taxes on $16k...

Edit: honestly i was MUCH more pissed that newegg just gave up my entire order history without my consent. Hey you want this guys complete PRIVATE order history? Here ya go! Oh u want to know what he bought and where he had it delivered and what credit card he used? Here ya go!

When they started collecting tax here in Washington, I almost entirely switched to B&H. When they start collecting tax, I'll probably be buying even more from Amazon :|
Anyway, that's why price aggregation sites like PCPartPicker come in handy.

Yeah, and as someone else pointed out, I wonder how this will effect small businesses with online stores? Does that mean they'll have to collect taxes for any state outside of their own as well? Wouldn't that be difficult without some sort of legal help, or am I missing something?

Basically. From what I understand, returns just go through a weigh to make sure everything is there, they dont open it up and inspect everything to make sure its all there. So someone orders the camera, weighs the box once it arrives, steal said camera, refill box to the previous weight with rocks/bricks and then they return it.

I've had 37 orders so far from Amazon this year. This works out to be $3.24 in shipping costs per order. That's $3.24 for same day to two-day shipping. It's not bad at all. It's even better when you factor in Prime video and the other services Amazon offers.

The question isn't how much it costs, though, it's how much it would have cost without Prime. How many of your orders were over $35? All of those would have shipped for free. How many of your orders arrived via ground/standard delivery services? All of those would have arrived on the same day.

Prime definitely has a lot of value if you use many of the available services, but most of the people using it primarily for shipping would be better off without.

Due to the price increase, I heard that you can create a "household" where you can share most Prime benefits with another adult (and some kids, but I didn't bother learning the details there). You don't even have to live at the same address, though they made it sound like you had to trust each other with your saved payment info.

So I added them to my household and had her turn off her Prime auto-renew. So instead of our combined total increasing by $42, it decreased by $78. While in hindsight I realize we could have been saving money this whole time, it was still a nice surprise to counteract the rate increase.

I'm honestly surprised they allow this, but they do so I'll take advantage of it.

These giant international companies hire people in impoverished nations, pay them as little as possible, work them as hard as possible, and toss them out the door when the company no longer needs them.

The world has operated this way for hundreds of years with only slight variations on that formula.

If this really bothers you, you'd better start buying everything from local small businesses who create their own merchandise. Good luck getting PC components.

You're muddying the issue. There are countless articles about Amazon warehouse conditions that he's referring to. If you can point to an article about newegg doing the same, great share it. Otherwise you're just writing it off vaguely.

I don't disagree with your overall point, just your method of going about it. I dislike general overarching points about the whole industry being bad when the specific conditions between them can vary wildly. You shouldn't punish one company for doing something if their competitors are much worse. It all needs to be relative.

So that being said, You can make judgement calls between companies in areas that are important to you. If you dislike how Amazon treats their workers and Newegg treats theirs better, that's a perfectly reasonable call to make. If someone else brings up information about Newegg treating their workers poorly you should take it into consideration.

You're never going to find a 100% ethical company. But you can find ones more ethical than others.

Amazon gets attention about this because they are a huge company and everyone knows them. Newegg could easily be as bad, but the average 50 year old watching the 6oclock news has never heard of Newegg, so journalists aren't going to bother investigating and they're not gonna put it on the air.

For example, look at employee review averages on glassdoor and indeed.

Company

glassdoor

indeed

Amazon

3.8 (out of 5)

3.7 (out of 5)

Newegg

2.3

3.1

Now I realize that Amazon has a whole lot of techies and from what I've heard working in the corporate offices is quite nice, and the warehouses are quite shit...and these numbers don't distinguish between the two.

Sales tax is when the retailer collects on your behalf. You should have been paying a use tax, which in almost all instances in equal to whatever the sales tax would have been. Same thing if you cross state borders to make tax free purchases, purchase something overseas, or in a duty free zone.

Yeah, I knew of it, but I called Revenue once to ask how to fill it out and they asked for a callback number. Like seven hours later I got a phone call from a cell phone and the agent wanted to know if I was serious because there's zero enforcement for use tax in my state but obviously they weren't going to say that in the office.

How will Newegg ever recover from this? The only reason people ordered there over Amazon is the lack of sales tax. Amazon's customer service and returns policies are objectively vastly superior in every way.

Just one example: Newegg has a "dead pixel policy" for monitors, allowing a certain number of dead pixels as acceptable. Where as at Amazon you can return any monitor for any reason for a full refund no questions asked.

Who would be stupid enough to buy the monitor at Newegg if they're both charging the same after tax?

Yup, there are a few computer parts companies that would need to totally revamp their customer service policies to even have a chance to survive. I bought an ASUS motherboard from SuperBiiz (1st mistake) that was bad (no surprise). I returned it 3 weeks ago and still no refund, I guess because they've sent it to ASUS to verify, who of course have a stupid long RMA process.

I haven't even heard from them (including acknowledging they've received the motherboard). I've already started with a dispute, considering calling my CC back to just do a chargeback. Technically, it's already off my bill, but I've gone from wanting them to serve their customer a little better to being a bit more petty now.

Their customer service is so sad, they wouldn't refund me a $5 difference a week after I bought some RAM, and was literally told the only solution I had was to buy a whole other set of RAM, and return the first one.

You better believe I did that shit, just to spite them, no fucking loss to me other than waiting a few extra days.

Meanwhile at Amazon if I decide that I simply didn't want something anymore (even if I opened it), I can just mark it as "misleading item description" and return it no questions asked. There is no way to compete with that.

Lower prices are what drive people to Newegg in the first place. However, here in the United States their prices are neck and neck with Amazon. With Newegg having to charge sales tax in every state rather than just the few they have warehouses in, they lose that price advantage in their home country.

If an item is priced the same at Newegg and Amazon, and they both charge tax, Amazon will win out 10 times out of 10 because of the ease of customer service. Newegg isn't large enough to absorb "no questions asked, rule free" returns.

Yeah, WA has sales tax but no income tax and a more favorable estate tax, so a lot of folks will live in all the cheaper new developments just over the river from Portland, then drive south for all their tax-free shopping. They're supposed to report it, but, you know how that goes.

Generally though, it's my understanding that this really isn't a favorable system for an individual unless they make over a certain amount or have a certain amount in assets.

eBay is the middle man, they leave it up to the sellers to collect appropriate state sales tax. I ran a big eBay store for a few years and we got audited by the state twice. We had to show how many sales we had done in the state and then show that we had collected sales tax from those users.

It's an option you select when making the auction and we had it on by default. We used a 3rd party shipping application that was fully integrated with both our eBay and Paypal accounts. It was easy to pull a report from users in the state and then show the invoices that had item price, shipping price and tax and whether or not it was paid via paypal (we only accepted paypal from auctions, no cash for local pickup)

This is a good question but I imagine it will be easily automated. The company will need to see what taxing jurisdictions the shipping address resides in and charges that state tax and applicable local taxes. Or maybe the individuals purchasing the items will be responsible for reporting the use tax to the local jurisdictions.

No one knows yet. If Virginia decides to start an online sales tax for every retailer and doesn’t retroactively claim sales taxes, it will only affect your future orders like at current physical stores such as Target, Best Buy, etc. If they do retroactive taxes, I’d say it’s likely that Newegg, B&H, and others might say you owe them money. But no one knows yet.

Supreme courts a dick in this. Online sales, if taxed, should be taxed at either the rate of the state the headquarters is in (for simplicity) or ideally the state the warehouse is in (kind of unreasonable). With online sales you're basically buying the item in another state then paying someone to bring it to you in my mind

Technically many of them should be require to, going by the letter of the law. Most ebay sellers aren't some random Joe selling their unwanted crap anymore. I imagine eBay or Paypal will end up creating a service to handle it for the sellers.

Newegg already charges sales tax in the states that they have physical warehouses/addresses. There's a Newegg warehouse less than 15 miles from my house, so I had literally ZERO incentive to ever order from them since Amazon's return process is so much easier.

The only true brick and mortar store with PC parts is Best Buy for me, and especially when it comes to PSUs and GPUs they don’t exactly try to compete with other retailers. Though I am glad it closes a loophole in our tax system, there was no reason for it to go on so long.

well i think part of it is because until now, it was basically impossible to compete with an online company where the purchaser pays ~8% less from the get go. best buy has done a remarkably good job pivoting their business to changing trends and not going out of business like most others. and their online store competes with newegg on peripherals and accesories.

Online store will continue to win this fight, but it's not going to be a huge difference anymore. Online stores will just sell the item cheaper and make them slightly less expensive after tax. Local stores have more expenses and wont be able to lower prices as much as online retailers.

I know this is a PC parts sub, but I'm thinking about the effects on everything. Some things I'd much prefer to buy after seeing them in person. And sorry you don't have a MicroCenter near you, it's just fantastic.

There is an issue of fairness at play. A brick and mortar gets tangible benifits from those taxes. Police and fire protection for their assets. Infrastructure improvements to their area that allows for easier, convenient and safe transit of customers and products. Services like water, sewer and waste removal.

This decision makes it so a company in California has to collect and pay sales taxes to Florida and yet will get nowhere near the same level services from the State of Florida that a brick and mortar gets.

The store doesn't pay the tax, the consumer does, and the consumer enjoys the benefits of local and state services. States have to generate income for those services somehow, and it can become a spiral:

(1) No tax online means it's cheaper, so people buy online.

(2) Less sales tax revenue forces local and state government to raise sales taxes.

(3) Even less incentive to buy B&M over online, and repeat.

I'm not one of those crazy "get rid of income tax and only tax sales" libertarian guys, but I think a sales tax serves a purpose and it seems weirdly perverse for a business to have a competitive edge because it isn't local.

Won't affect big business like amazon, walmart. It will p[probably help them in the long run and hurt smaller business. As most people shop there to avoid paying state sale tax. If the tax goes in affect you are essentially paying the same tax no matter where you shop. And big retailer can sell it a bit cheaper and edge out the smaller biz. shame as I use retailers like newegg, buydig, adorama and BH for big ticket purchases. Maybe I should get all my Christmas shopping done early this year.